But there is a reason it is no longer used much. A single instruction could generate up to six page faults. The 68k put the C in CISC.

That isn't the reason why it isn't used much anymore.

Number of page faults generated in total doesn't have much to do with architectures. If you try to do the same thing on x86 you will get just as many page faults but spread out over more instructions.The main reason 68k assembly isn't used anymore is because ARM is a cheaper design than ColdFire and in most cases where they were competing the controller didn't even have cache.

It's a bit of a shame really. While ARM assembly is a bit nicer than x86 it is s

> Number of page faults generated in total doesn't have much to do with architectures. If you try to do the same thing on x86 you will get just as many page faults but spread out over more instructions.

Ur missing the point, totally. Resuming or restarting instructions complicates things, and the more resume/restarts one instruction can have, the more complex that single instruction gets. It does matter.

68k lost because it did not remain performance-competitive. It was a CISC processor that did not have the benefit of a huge software base that could fund its continued development. Motorola/Freescale lacked the engineering talent to overcome the challenges required and chose instead to focus development on the 88k family that was far more modern. That family was also a failure and Moto lucked into the gift of the PowerPC family from IBM (who did

The real, real reason that 68k isn't used anymore is that Motorola fell for the PowerPC meme. 88K was supposedly a pretty decent architecture, and they killed both at the same time. Coldfire was just the scraps of 68K for the embedded market. Apple switched architectures twice because Motorola couldn't stay interested in making high-end desktop CPUs.

The x86 instruction set was horrible, and Motorola could have used the same tricks on 68K that kept x86 going so long.

But really, the root cause reason that 68k isn't used anymore happened in 1981 or so when IBM picked the 8088. There are various legends about what happened, but the most coherent intersection of them that I have been able to deduce is that Intel wanted the 68008 (because the 8-bit bus would let them make a cheaper system), Motorola didn't want to commit to their deadline, Intel went with the 8088, and then Motorola had the 68008 out by the deadline anyhow. It surely didn't help any that at the time (as related in the DTACK-Grounded newsletter), Motorola's marketing group really only wanted to sell the 68K for $10,000+ Unix systems, and couldn't be bothered with embedded or consumer customers.

It isn't used much any more because it was beaten by x86, three times:

First, it lost to the x86 because x86 is assembly-source-code compatible with the 8080, making it easy to port CP/M software to PC/MS-DOS, giving the IBM PC a huge advantage over any 68k-based system in the early '80s, giving that platform a momentum which it never lost.

Second, it lost to x86 because Intel was able to pump far more money into developing their architecture than Motorola was able to spend on theirs (see my first point!), so

Because Motorola would not budge on price when IBM came to them wanting to use it in their new "PC", while second choice Intel would.

Actually, because the 68000 wasn't in production yet when IBM came around. Motorola had sample chips, but they weren't production ready (The 68000 was in production in November, 1980. The IBM PC launched in August, 1981).

Whereas the 8088 was long ready and in production, so IBM could get it all done in 12 months. The 68000 would be 3 months into the IBM design before it was re

Yes, it was simple (threadbare? if you insist) and specifically designed to be. I prefer complexity in the software, not the hardware. Teh compiler takes the slack - the hardware was designed *with the compiler writers*, as a group. With, not after. Yes, and long trap shadows were a pain and made instruction-synchronous later, but yes, it was designed for speed. And the initial lack of stores less than 32 bits were complained about also. I get that.>You were asm'ing?What else do you want me to say?>RE

Perhaps it's ironic, but after using assembly on the Amiga I got a 286 PC, looked at the instruction set, and then learned C back on the Amiga. Ironic because that's the best language choice I ever made, but motivated by loathing.

Many of the worst issues with x86 assembly were resolved with the 386. The instruction set was more orthogonal and the memory layout was simpler to use. That said, there are three things I wish that Intel or AMD had included with the 386:

1) a couple more address base registers (ie, EAB, ECB, EDB) so we didn't have to borrow general purpose registers for address indirect ops, or just add more GPRs like they did with AMD64 and the Z80002) support for index and displacement address modes with the CALL instru

The 68000 came out in 1980. It and Motorola weren't hobbled by "100% backwards compatibility" something Intel was with their dysfunctional relationship with Microsoft. But that aside, sure the 386 fixed some, but not all, of the issues with x86 assembly. It would take many more years to do even a little bit better (no pun intended). If Motorola hadn't PPC/mobile abandoned the 68000 architecture, who knows where we'd be? (Hindsight is 20/20, but we're projecting too much to think Motorola wouldn't have been

One of the smartest people I know used to program emulators in FPGA. He programmed emulators for everything: TRS-80, TI-99/4A, Sinclair 1000, PDP-8, PDP-11, IBM zSeries, Cray, you name it. He eventually started doing contracts for major government contractors such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc., and often for $200K to $600K a pop. He was very well respected in that community, and knew how to get around most of the problems inherent in FPGA emulation.

Anyways, he was paid to do a few contracts for Amiga computers, and had the most trouble with them. Apparently, their custom, decentralized architecture introduced severe "resolution artifacts" (his words, not mine) into any emulated FPGA bus. Another huge problem was something that had to do with feedback loops introduced by eddy currents caused by some of the FPGA parallelization circuits that came about due to optimization algorithms for the silicon etching process.

At the end of the day, he was very, very close to solving all of these problems, and he went outside to walk to the local 7-11 to get a Mountain Dew to refresh his energy. He crossed the wrong basketball court, however, and some local residents started getting into a beef with him, causing a lot of trouble. Those guys were clearly up to no good. End of story, his mother was afraid he'd get into more trouble in his neighborhood (after all, Philadelphia has one of the highest homicide rates in the country), so she sent him to live with his aunt in California. He took a cab to his aunt's house when he arrived at the airport, and was inspired by a pair of dice he saw hanging from the cabbie's review mirror. He thought to himself, "Life is a gamble, why waste time solving FPGA bus problems for antiquated architectures?" and gave it up in an instant. "Smell you later, dude!" he said, and sold all of his FPGA patents the next day.

The current vampires I don't think accelerate all of the old stuff / the whole machine but they do have additional video modes and such so if there's any truth to your story if they doesn't implement it all it may be without those issues but less compatible.

Now for a full machine rather than expansion I would assume they will actually implement it all plus much more considering the extra capability.

Their accelerators still run m68k but are very fast vs "even" a real m68060.

I loved my Amiga, but now it's time for me to put aside childish things...

...and just use a free, open source software emulator [fs-uae.net] if I ever want to reminisce. Why would you want to spend good money on hardware to emulate an old machine when there is a free software emulator to run it on the machine you already have at faster speeds than the original?

>...and just use a free, open source software emulator [fs-uae.net] if I ever want to reminisce.

I can dole out upvotes in the thread, but I feel it's important to address this.

Emulators miss ALOT. It's just not the same. It's like the difference between CRT and LCD monitors. LCD's are convenient because they're portable (much like an emulator), but I've had CRT's that could do 120hz in the 90's. I love using SID as an example because so many people know what a SID chip is. Sure, you can emulate a S

This doesn't mean it can't get closer to the original. Hardware emulation introduces less latency than software emulation. This might not be important for turn based games or whatever but having responsive controls not only makes fast-paced games easier to play, it makes them feel more fun.

Have you tried a software emulator? Modern machines are easily powerful enough to emulate it accurately at full speed without glitches. For 8 bit machines like the BBC Model B there is even a full speed emulator in javasscript that runs in a webpage. This even plays the tape and disk sounds when loading! When you have several orders of magnitude more computing power you don't need hardware emulation to provide an amazingly accurate simulation.

The games can run 100% accurately at full speed and still have latency. Latency means how quickly the output of the program reacts to the input, not how fast the program runs. Emulators will typically add several frames of latency. It's not all even the emulators' fault, audio buffers, USB polling speed, frame buffers, LCD display all contribute to latency. Old hardware typically didn't have the memory for audio or video buffering so trading latency for quality wasn't even an option.

Emulators miss ALOT. It's just not the same. It's like the difference between CRT and LCD monitors.

It's interesting you mention this (To me) since my Amiga 1200 is connected to a Sharp AQUOS 4:3 countertop LCD TV that I picked up at the Salvation Army, cheap. It looks remarkably good for using just CVBS.

The PDF says it will probably cost more than the current models, which go for ~$300 or more. Kind of expensive when you could easily get a modern PC for about the same price. I mean, it's not an absurd price, but definitely niche stuff.

Indeed. Honestly - I'd be more interested in an Amiga OS for something like a Raspberry Pi. Compared to the original Amiga hardware those $25 boards are like a darned super computer.

Even if they came up with their own board, it's got to be something in that $25-50 price range if they want people to really "play" with it. At hundreds of dollars the only people who are going to get it are people fondly remembering the Amiga - a demographic that is shrinking every day.

There's Morphos out there. It will run on the powerpc imacs that are not all that ancient yet and possibly a few other things.Some of tiny little powerpc macbooks are probably as fast as some reasonably recent netbooks if not quite up to Raspberry Pi speed.

That's strange... I remember it as Agnes also. And there was Daphne and another. Wikipedia now says Denise. I could be mixing it up with the Atari ST as I followed both very carefully through development.

I don't care. Maybe they changed the name, but it was referred to as Agnes for a long time. At least up until 85-86 when I switched over to IBM PCs. Could have been the development name. It would be interesting to find why the name change.

It's too bad the mouse hardware itself was so crap. A friend hacked a serial mouse into an Amiga mouse for me once, but it wasn't a particularly good mouse to start with. Of course, these days you can just get a USB converter... but I think I will probably hack another mouse, if I can find a decent ball mouse to start with. I'm going to the flea market today... the same flea where I found my DSS8+

The thing about Amiga owners is you can't get them to shut up about their Amiga. It's like the guy who doesn't have a TV, or the guy who rides a bike to work. We don't give a shit about your Amiga, dude.

Same problem as this product. Most Amigas lack an MMU out of the box, so you need an accelerator with a non-LC processor mounted on it, which jacks up the price. This is why I ran netbsd on a Macintosh IIci instead of my Amiga 1200. It just worked, and supported all the onboard hardware. A Mac II is a much nicer place to run netbsd/68k, and the IIci is the nicest Mac II. (An SE/30 would be another obvious candidate.) The 68030@25 is perfectly adequate if you have a cache card, and IIRC it has fast SCSI-II w

I admit it's true. The machines were pure magic in the 80s and into late 90s. Sadly I had to move on and I learned to love linux after many years. I still have my Amiga collection though and bought a Vampire II a few months ago. I remember how pissed off and aggravated most of my pc owning friends were with their windows problems in the 90s and they looked longingly at my amiga but just couldn't handle the cost. It was dreadfully expensive. I was about to buy an Amiga 4000 when Commodore tanked and the cost

The thing about Amiga owners is you can't get them to shut up about their Amiga. It's like the guy who doesn't have a TV, or the guy who rides a bike to work.

A tornado just tore a path across your city, leveling buildings and splintering concrete structures. Your home is no longer safe, subjected to countless fires, seeping sewage, wild animals and violent looters that even the National Guard can't tame, so like hundreds - thousands - of other citizens, you find yourself waiting in line to get into an emergency shelter put together haphazardly in the mold-infested gymnasium of the nearby middle school.

The line doesn't move fast, and you're worried as you see the absurdly small crate of water bottles shrinking quickly as people ahead of you greedily grab two, three or even four bottles as they walk by. You try to do the math, half-guessing, half-dreading that there won't be any water left by the time you reach the gate. You already have a debilitating headache because of dehydration; the situation is dire, the future uncertain.

Then someone puts a hand on your shoulder.

"Friend," says an older gentleman, his voice so soft, so quiet, like a cool summer breeze. "Friend," he says, "are you okay?"

There's something in his eye. A glint, a shadow, a whisper of past experiences so painful that they left a permanent mark on his soul.

"I'm okay," you reply, weakly, with a voice crackling like a pane of glass shattered by the axe of a firefighter. "I'm okay."

The kind man nods, although you can tell he's still worried.

"I'm okay," you repeat. "I just wish I could go back home, to my Amiga computer."

I know about everyone who complains about people with particular interests, that they would constantly speak about their particular interests, because those complainers never stop complaining about people with particular interests being so verbose about their particular interests.

The only stories we run on Amiga are about the release of a new computer. The comments then always boil down to the same thing:

a) My first computer was an Amigab) There's places where the original Amiga is still runningc) This company is a shell with nothing to do with the Amiga that made the Amiga great.d) This product is too expensive and completely irrelevant.e) This is a shameless Slashvertisement and is about the only Amiga related stories that gets run here anymore.

In this case, at least, C) is incorrect. I assumed this was yet another company that had gotten questionable ownership of the trademark and was planning to launch an overpriced generic PC with "Amiga" on the case and a glitchy open-source emulator preloaded, but this is a real implementation of the architecture in hardware by people who care about the platform.

So what exactly is this based on? The original Amiga was a Mot 68k, then it was ported, iirc, to the PowerPC. So has it moved to ARM now, or x86? Also, is the OS still a 16-bit one, or is it now 64-bit? I read the PDF: what instruction set does the Altera cyclone follow? I do think it's neat that they've put this all on an FPGA: hopefully, that'll help make this device somewhat competitive.

Potentially nice for what? Running software that doesn't exist on machines no one has for a platform decades out of date with performance that's obsolete? But hey, at least it might clock in the "GHz range". We all know that's all that matters.

But a modern version is pointless. AmigaOS - even the latest version - is hopelessly outdated. And what Amiga software is out there that anyone would actually want to use? Besides games? Which can be emulated *perfectly* on a $50 Raspberry Pi?

Amiga programs that still have no equivalent today:
RGS: Realtime Graphic Synthesis
Using build-in primitive paint program, you painted a sonogram of a sound, and heard it synthesized in real time.
Later on, another programmer coded a companion program that would let you import/export those images to other graphics programs.

I don't recall the program name, but there was a 3D sonogram program that would let you draw a box around a time/frequency area, then change its amplitude. This made things lik

The bowling alley here in town still uses a few Amigas to keep the score for each lane. I'm not entirely sure how it works or exactly what it does (since I don't know anything about bowling), but the machines somehow track the scores and post them on monitors over each lane.

The owner told me once that he has a whole pile of Amigas for spare parts in the back.

Some cable companies used them for many years. I picked up a Commodore PET from a local library sale not long ago, they used it for some database for 30 something years. It had a huge double 5.25" floppy drive hooked to it with a huge IEEE cable. $20

I'm not entirely sure how it works or exactly what it does (since I don't know anything about bowling), but the machines somehow track the scores and post them on monitors over each lane.

Ten pins in bowling, ten (or was it eleven?) pins on the Amiga parallel port which can be used as inputs. Pinsetter connected to the Amiga somehow. Some Amigas have color composite video output onboard, eg CDTV, 1200...

This is one of the most exciting devices to come out of Amiga land in a long time. What this new hardware and core is doing is bringing back to life the Classic 68k CPU, and the Amiga hardware chip-set. To give everyone an idea what they are planning (this info taken from various postings):

1) Apollo Core 68080 is not only the fastest 68000 series CPU ever, it also is the most fully featured and compatible (even fixing old 68k bugs). It includes technologies from newer CPU's such as AMMX (AMMX is the 68k ver

Yeah, you can hook up a 500GB drive to it, that ought to be enough for the entire Amiga game software library! If you're lucky, you might even find one of the rare 750GB or 1 terabyte drives that were made right as IDE got deprecated! Then you can have all that extra space ready to fill up after the army of Amiga developers makes hot new games to run on the 2000 or so of these that will ever get built! Amiga forever, maaan!

I think the point the AC was making was that people are still enthused about a computer that came out in 1985. (ish?) I still have my Amiga I bought used with the 512K expansion pack (with the battery removed of course.) Lots of overtime at the local car dealership washing cars for that one.:)

There is no such enthusiasm for the 8088's. Most of the support those old behemoths get are from the sheer number of them rotting in storage buildings and at the local Goodwill. The Amiga's like a vintage automobile. It's got a loyal following, a bunch of 3rd party support and enthusiasts, and a wealth of games and apps that were truly ahead of their time. Thanks to Commodore's board, the Amiga died prematurely, IMHO.

I admit, I only use Amiga through emulation these days, but I did all my college work on my A500 up until I found Slackware Linux my senior year.:)

You have a point, the Amiga wore the crown in a time when there were many different computer brands, and they were all being thinned out. Only a few were able to survive that, and even Apple had trouble against the PC.

Look at it another way, though. There was enough room in the market for another OS (Linux), so why not for another hardware platform as well? Perhaps difficult, but it seems like it would have been possible.

A Mac will absolutely have 30 weeks of tech su... oh wait, 30 years? Yeah, good luck with that.

Apple doesn't even put a decent, normal amount of RAM in their computers now and even removed the memory slots so we can upgrade them ourselves. It's either pay upfront at the beginning for more RAM or buy something that won't even last three years.

One is a PPC machine which run emulated 68k code too and is very expensive whereas the other is "just" the fastest most modern 68k Amiga around in a pretty cheap package. Atleast as far as just the vampire cards go.